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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Official Support for Netflix for MediaCenter Arrives

Vista Media Center users are about to get a nice suprise. Native support for Netflix inside of the MediaCenter user interface was announced late last night on the GreenButton Forums.

The Good: Microsoft and Netflix have agreed to bring Netflix inside the MediaCenter UI (for US, Netflix members only) without requiring any 3rd party add-ons or workarounds.

The Bad: It won’t work on the extenders including XBox360. This isn’t surprising, but very disappointing. The Netflix add-on was built using Silverlight which is one of the reasons we won’t be seeing this add-on for the extenders. Another bad for the early adopters: It doesn't work in Windows7... yet.

Features:

Browse and search the Netflix library – filter searches by titles available for watch-instantly

Why Not Extenders?

They didn’t add this to the extenders which is very disappointing. Another example of how they almost seem like they want the extender model to fail. Yes you can get Netflix on the XBox360, but not within the MediaCenter UI and even then you have to pay for the extra XBox360 Gold Live service add-on.

A Great Addition

Despite another slight to extenders, the Netflix native support in MediaCenter is a great addition and one that just makes sense for both Microsoft and Netflix.